hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2376.txt

Episode: 2376
Title: HPR2376: Information Underground: 21st Century Superstar
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2376/hpr2376.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 01:59:32

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This is HBR episode 2,376 entitled Information Underground, 21st Century Superstar.
It is hosted by Klaatu and is about 53 minutes long and Karima Cleanflag.
The summary is DeepGeek, Lost in Bronx and Klaatu talk about iconless culture.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hi everyone, this is Lost in Bronx and you are listening to Information Underground on Hacker Public Radio.
With me today are DeepGeek.
Hello.
And Klaatu.
Hey everybody.
Today I want to talk about a particular question.
I have this written down so I don't sound like a complete idiot so I'll just read it through and maybe we can go on and see what you guys think.
Do we live in an era now when widespread cultural influences are extinct?
Will there ever be another Marilyn Monroe?
Will there ever be another Beatles?
Is the connectivity of the internet allowing people to find their own media and cultural niches to the point where someday soon we will no longer have any common ground whatsoever?
There are a couple of media theories out there about the intersection of media and culture.
There are three dominant views in academia about how these things intersect.
First one is called limited effects.
The next one is called class dominant and the third is called culturalist.
Now I'll go over these because I think they have an influence on this point but they are not the main focus of where I want to go.
But limited effects.
Now the idea here is that people consume the media that most supports their current interests, beliefs or values.
So in this context, the idea is like people will watch CNN or Fox News because they already believe the sorts of messages that are being told through those outlets.
That's the idea of limited effects so that the media doesn't have a lot of impact under this theory because people are already gravitating toward the thing that they already believe.
So it doesn't really have much effect under this theory.
The next one is called class dominant.
Media is controlled by commercial outfits looking for profit and media content, especially the news, tends to be controlled by the owners and managers of the companies.
The audience then mostly only sees the content that is in line with the interests, beliefs and values of the company or its management.
Now that's the idea that Ted Turner produces his content ultra conservative or inflammatory because that's the way he thinks he wants everyone.
That's what he wants to push.
And I pulled him out of thin air.
He's not necessarily not to point out him or anyone in particular, but that's just an example.
And finally, the final view is culturalist.
That's relatively new theory which combines both the limited effects in class dominant theory.
In this case, both of those are true in this theory.
Both of those are true, but it allows people to decide for themselves.
So in other words, people are already going to go to what they think is important.
And yes, you do have an elite class that is dominating the media, but the people are still just going to go to what they think is important anyway.
So those are those those theories and there's other perspectives that we can get into at another time.
But the point here is that do these first off my question is do these things have an effect? Do they hold water first off?
Secondly, do we live in an era where everything is so tailor made where I can find the exact type of shows, the exact type of music?
No matter how obscure that I want to experience to the point where I cannot recognize any of the top 10 tunes when I turn on the radio.
I cannot I don't know what they are.
I've never heard them before.
Many people are consuming these things.
They find, you know, they share that experience, but there are many, you know, more and more as time goes on.
There are more people like me who've never heard it at all because we spend our time involved in media that is so it is so tailored to what I like.
And yes, I personally have sought it out or found it by accident, you know, either way, but I have gravitated towards it.
But it's so niche that it's to the point where I can even appreciate a dominant, you know, media influence on our wider culture.
Is any of this making any sense?
Yeah, it's making a lot of sense.
I've never heard these media theories that you're talking about, which kind of surprises me because I went to school for media communication, that sort of thing.
But what you're saying makes a whole lot of sense.
I do have some links and I'll throw them in the show notes so that people can, you know, take a look at this stuff themselves.
Obviously, I'm paraphrasing, you know, I don't I don't want to do it verbatim, but I'm paraphrasing what some of these theories are.
But I'm not even sure necessarily that they encapsulate the question that I'm trying to get to.
I mean, will there ever be another Beatles?
Will there ever will, you know, when a piece of older music comes on, and yes, it's because I'm of a certain age, right?
But when a piece, you know, of music, I'm not, I've never been into music.
I mean, you guys, you know, know me well enough to know that I am not a music guy, right?
I have never been in the music yet, simply for the fact that I have lived in America, you know, for 54 years.
When, you know, sweet home Alabama comes on the radio, I can sing the entire song.
Even though I've never seen those guys, you know, I never saw them in concert.
I never bought that album in my entire life.
I've never paid for that album, yet I know the song backwards and forwards, right?
And I can do that with probably a hundred other songs that were very popular throughout my life, right?
And not because I bought a single one of them or even thought they were the most, the greatest song in the world.
It's just they were so culturally dominant that it infused into my life.
I heard it on the radio, I heard it on TV, I heard it backing up commercials, I've heard them all my life.
Will, is that era over?
Well, it sounds to me like you're pining for that not to be over, but from my point of view, I hope it's over.
I think it's fantastic that you've found a niche within within your interests.
And I think you're underestimating people's desire to feel like they are connected to the wider world.
And I think that's at this point, largely what's perpetuating it, where people want to make sure that they don't go to the water cooler, the proverbial water cooler.
And people are chatting about something and they won't know what to talk about because they didn't see that episode of that TV show or they don't know that song.
And so people want to keep seeking this out because they want to be on that in crowd.
Okay, first off, I do not pine for that era.
Please don't get that wrong.
That is absolutely not the direction I'm coming from.
I don't see anything wrong with this.
And in fact, I think the more we embrace it, the better off we'll be.
And the reason being, and I don't mean to cut anybody off, I just jump in if you need to.
But the reason I don't pine for that is because what we all consider to be dominant cultural influences came at someone else's expense.
Right?
So the reason that I know sweet home Alabama so well is because so many other people's music, you know, cultural influence music, other types of music,
and niche music that already existed never got to air.
All right, and that's the reason why that's been drilled into my head.
I must disagree with you on that one point, I think, but go on, please.
No, no, please, please do jump in.
I'd like to hear what you think about this.
Yeah, let's hear this disagreement.
Okay, well, I mean, I don't think at the expense of someone else is the right way of putting it.
The examples you gave are Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles.
And both those examples were cataclysmic because of things going on culturally in the background.
Marilyn Monroe was like the first sex symbol and it was the end and ending of very, very even more repressive American sexual morays that we have now.
I was bored about by the colorization of movie media, I believe.
The Beatles also wasn't at the expense of the people who were not getting airtime.
But at the time, music, they were just figuring out how to ship it.
And the Beatles and Liverpool that was a port city were able to ship their vinyl across the sea to America.
And to give them something new as opposed to the same thing in America that was having over and over again, they had a totally new music.
The rock and roll revolution was largely influenced by blues prior to the Beatles.
And then the Beatles started a new era going forward and music after the Beatles is almost a footnote to it.
But I don't think that has to do with people not getting airtime on popular media.
And I had an experience recently, I got into a new artist, his name is Troy Savon.
He's also the spokesperson for guest genes.
And he just got an award in Australia for having so many billions of downloads.
No one I know has heard of him until I told him about it here.
But I picked it up and I fell in love with this voice on a TV show.
And so I think if anything, the structures of the internet and the structures of cable and of having more channels as opposed to the old three major channels is making it easier for more people to get out there.
Well, I agree. I agree. But will we ever see anybody change things the way say the Beatles did?
Will we ever see another Beatles? Will there ever be anyone that has such a huge cultural impact?
Because as time goes on, I think fewer and fewer people will agree that this is the thing that we want to celebrate.
This is the thing that we all want to appreciate.
Now, there are modern examples that fly in the face of this.
I mean, the madness surrounding all game of thrones and how people have just, you know, it's gotten to the point.
I've heard of, you know, situations where, you know, people are forbidden to talk about it in, you know, like in their office because so and so didn't get a chance to see the latest episode and won't get a chance to see it until Thursday or something like that.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's become kind of a cultural thing, but it's also entirely ephemeral.
When that show goes off the air, it will not have had a major impact on our culture, not the way these other things did.
These other things were groundbreaking. They changed everything.
I think that, sorry, no, go ahead.
I was going to say, I think that part of that is sort of the naivete of the society that had not as deep gig did say they hadn't had access to this mass media before.
You know, it was like, oh my gosh, we've all heard of the Beatles and isn't that exciting that we've all heard of them.
It's like this phenomenon. And I do think that that started getting mixed up with other things like there was a lot of politic sort of political up people at that same time, both I think for the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe probably.
And people kind of started, I think I wasn't there, but I get the impression that people pinned certain hopes and dreams and desires on these things.
You know, we're going to change the world through music, man. It's going to be great. All you need is love. And then people realized that that was just marketing.
It was not that wasn't how things worked. That's not the real world.
So at this point, if someone did come up and rise up and say, hey, I'm the new Elvis or whatever, I just don't think people would buy into it because we've all been there, done that now.
And it just doesn't have the same magic to it.
So you feel it cynicism more than than the as I don't really have a proper term or word diversity diversity of media diversity of media.
I think so. I think I am saying that I don't want to be saying that, but I do think, yeah, I think that the reason we're not latching on to one one pop messiah is because the last pop messiahs that we all latched on to didn't really pan out for us.
Now, of course, we're talking, or at least I'm talking from a perspective of from the United States, right. And in other countries that this isn't necessarily the view of things and there's certain like in Japan, there are certain cultural elements, you know, popular music and popular shows, popular things that everybody does seem to get behind it.
And it does become part of everybody's lives there and part of the larger dialogue of culture, you know, certain anime, like everybody watches one piece, even if they don't like it, they watch it because everybody's watching it.
You know, that's sort of I've read about stuff like that, you know, a lot of people follow baseball, even if they don't like it because, you know, the, you know, the giants over there, which is a big big team over there.
Well, you just do because they're popular and everybody does it. And that's part of that's endemic to their culture that they want to be a part, you know, everybody wants to take an active part in the culture, but I think that even there it's breaking down.
I truly do believe that we are past the era where we're we're not past the era where someone is going to be huge or marketed to the point where they're massive and they make lots and lots of money, right.
You know, every now and then you hear about some pop music guy who's sold more records than Elvis Presley ever did, right.
Right. Or so, and it's no one you've ever heard of, right. Yet supposedly they get a lot of airtime and they get a lot of, you know, they get awards, they get this, they get this, and they have exactly zero impact on the wider culture.
And once their career is done, no one will ever speak of these people again because while they're entertaining people temporarily, they have made no impact on the wider culture.
There's no common dialogue there that people say this has changed my life, you know, the way Elvis did the way rock and roll is as a whole did, you know, the Beatles later on, you know, all of these things.
None of this stuff. I think that era is done primarily until some new medium comes through that is going to have a huge market share that everyone will buy into.
And that primarily it comes out of nowhere. I don't think it can be planned. It's not something that can be, you know, dreamed up in a marketing, you know, meeting somewhere in New York or Los Angeles.
It's something that's going to be much more organic if it happens. And I don't think we're going to see it in radio, TV, movies.
I think those days are gone. You know, I think the internet has allowed us to access exactly what I want.
You know, I've been rewatching Stargate SG1 a show that's been off the air for many years now. Right. That's all I've been watching. I haven't been watching anything else. I have no idea what's popular. Right. And I think that as people's access to things like Netflix and Amazon video and all the rest.
And we can have that conversation about big corporations controlling the media, which as I say, that's part of this dialogue, but it's not really the focus that I want to go in.
But the back catalog on this sort of thing allows people to find exactly what they're after, you know, exactly precisely the thing that scratches their itch.
Music wise, you know, video wise news, the news, you can consume exactly the kind of news you want to, when I was a kid, that was impossible.
You know, you had three channels in your local and that was it. And they were all going to be reporting pretty much the same thing and they might have a slight, a slightly different perspective.
You know, they might have a slightly different political perspective, but it was nothing overt. It was never anything overt. Those days are gone. Those days are long gone.
Yeah, but still even even even with that example, lust and Bronx, I mean, NBC used to be owned by by GE. And so they would never report anything bad about the nuclear industry.
That went on forever.
Well, that goes back to the idea of the class dominant media theory where you have a particular agenda. In this case, the agenda is never to say anything bad about nuclear power.
Yeah, and it makes you wonder because you know that I had the newscast, of course, you did some of the, some of the, some of the in-between parts of it for me very kindly of you.
And, you know, at its height, it was 350 people listening.
Well, that's more, you know, I do a regular podcast where I just talk about myself. And if I have 10 people listening, I'd be amazed.
350 isn't bad. And the nice thing about your show, even though it was just a podcast put out by a guy I know, it was information I had never heard before.
It was coming from outside of a class dominant, you know, the class dominant theory. Let's put it that way. It's coming from outside of that, that thing.
Just by consuming your news show, I was getting a tailor-made show that was so niche. I could talk about the stories that you brought up to other people.
And it would be the first they ever heard of any of that because they're watching something completely different. They're listening to things that are completely different.
It's so tailored, right? And in many cases, in this case, it was also a limited effect concept because I am listening to your stuff. I gravitate to it, you know.
Now, you're my friend. I gave it a shot because you're my friend. I kept listening because I liked it. It agreed with my sensibilities.
Plus, it was new. It was always had information I didn't know. So put those two together and you end up with that culturalist theory where both of these things are working together.
Where you do have, you know, what, like in your case, you know, from your perspective, you were the, you know, your show was class dominant because you're presenting the views that you think are important.
And I'm listening to your show. So from my perspective, it becomes limited effect because I'm already listening to the thing I want to hear.
Right. These things can go hand in hand. Now, I'm not saying I'd buy into any of this. I'm just, these are, these are some theories that are out there.
But I, I believe that the more we tag on to the things that we like the most and the more these things become available through primarily the internet, but through other types of media as well.
Taylor made to exactly the sort of thing that I like. It will get to the point where I can't even have a cultural dialogue with other people around me. It's already almost that way now, you know.
It's, it's, it's, it's incredibly difficult. I mean, I have a tremendous amount of trouble finding, finding out what, what to view.
Even within my special niche interests, I mean, I don't know what, what's good in science fiction movies. I don't know what's good in film law fandom.
And, and I would like to know these things and I don't know where to turn a long time ago, we did, we did an HDR episode on Forbidden Planet.
I didn't know what that movie was until we did that show. You know, I mean, I think a big up a problem is, how do you find something?
I mean, is it, is it a flip side lost in Bronx? Is it how do you find something that's niche as opposed to how do you find something that's universally desirable?
Well, I think the universally popular is easy to find. It's just not always easy to consume. And what I mean by that is, I, it would be very easy for me to watch reality TV. It's, it's everywhere. It's, you know, it's not hard to find.
And, you know, it gets the ratings. It's what's popular. You could talk about survivor and all these other horrible shows and have a lot of people that you come into regular contact with.
You'd be able to have a dialogue with them about it, but because it's very far outside of my own interests, it would be very difficult for me to consume that content.
So I have to find my own. And yes, it can be a little difficult to find something that you're, you know, I mean, 10,000 channels and nothing to watch. That's an old, you know, an old joke.
But the idea to though, you don't, you're not limited to just TV anymore, you know, and you're not limited to just like movies or television.
You know, I mean, if you expand your view into things like anime or manga or or cartoons in general or podio books or, you know, audio drama, which is my bag.
All of these things, you can end up listening to the exact kind of science fiction you like, like all of your waking hours and never, never consume anything that anyone else thinks is important.
I could have conversations and tell people how fantastic Edic Zero FIS is, which is an audio show done by a guy named Jack Concate.
Now, you know, disclaimer, you know, I have a role on that show, but I have a role on that show because I pursued him.
It was my favorite show and I wanted to do a background voice or something. I wanted to be a part of it because I thought it was such a fantastic show.
So I have, this idea of things being tailored to an individual listener, it's gotten to the point where I am actually helping to produce the content because I am so, it is so tailored to me.
I have, I have gravitated to a particular show to the point where I wanted to be even more integrated with that experience and, and it's become a big part of my life, right.
And yet, I probably could, I don't know, I would probably have to travel a thousand miles before I found anyone who even knew what the hell the show was, right.
It's, there's no, no, no common cultural experience there, even though it's such a big part of my life.
And that's just an example, but everybody these days, more and more people are having elements like that in their lives, whereas in the old days, you know, no, not everybody went to the same church, but everybody went to church or at least knew what the hell that was.
It's gotten to the, my son has never been in a church in his life, you know.
I mean, it's, it's getting to the point where there, there's no commonality in our dialogue getting more.
Everything always comes back to Linux for me, so, or at least open source. And so what you're describing.
And I think what DB is sort of, is questioning. It's just, yeah, when you have that much choice and that much sort of open, open contribution to culture.
I do think that you, yeah, people, when they start to venture out into that territory, they feel lost because, yeah, it's like, why can't there just be one sci-fi show, you know?
Like, why do we have to have all these sci-fi shows, you know, it's just, and that's a problem to someone coming new to the territory, but people in it who are living it are like, oh, this is fantastic.
We have 50 different things to choose from and I only like this one, but that's my thing.
And then you do have to find, you have to seek out the cultural satisfaction of, hey, everybody, let's talk about the recent episode.
Because if you do that at work or around town, no one has heard of the thing, but if you go and seek out the other fans, then you guys can talk.
Although then you have my problem where none of the other fans actually like it for the same reasons that you like it. So you're still alone wolf.
But I mean, it's, I don't know, I like that. I really, I really like that. And I hope that it continues and goes further.
Well, in a way, this is where things like comic cons have become so important because there is enough commonality for these people to have a conversation now.
And there's enough people that appreciate this content now, but there's still not, there's still not close enough to each other that they, you know, people don't buy in large.
They don't have a local, oh, we have a local, you know, science fiction club. And we just get together and talk about science fiction. And sometimes we dress up.
That doesn't happen. I've never heard of that. Okay. You know, maybe it does somewhere, but it doesn't happen here. And I, I've never heard of it.
But they do have a comic book convention. We have Linux conventions and most of the, I would argue most of the people that go to something like an open source or free software convention or, you know,
if you don't want to use the word convention, you can, you know, pick any one of the best of all whatever, you know, they're all the same concept.
And I would argue that most of the people that go there are users. They're not, they're not programmers. They're not, they're not developers. They're, they're people like someone like myself, who may, you know, every now and then, you know,
cobble a script together. And that's about the extent that I've ever done. Right. But if I wanted a commonality, I could go there and talk a, you know, talk a language that other people would understand.
Whereas around here, I couldn't, I, I'd never be able to find that. And that's where a place like that. That, that's when you start having that commonality.
But even those things have become very, very stratified, you know, because if someone who's a huge windows fan went to, you know, the Ohio Linux Fest.
And I'm sure every now and then you get a few, and you get many people that are our windows experts that go there, even if it's not the operating system they understood that they love the most.
But if you were an out and out windows fanboy and you went there, you'd have a very unpleasant time. And that's because you would not have a commonality.
You would not have that dialogue and that, and that ability to have a conversation about how much you love a particular thing.
You know, you mentioned science fiction. And that's a really good, when I was a kid, I knew every science fiction show that came on on television. I watched them all.
And I watched every science fiction movie that came out. And I could do that because there were so few of them.
You know, I even saw most of the B film. And that was possible back then. It's impossible to keep up with just the TV shows now.
You know, I can say that I love the show dark matter. I don't know if you've seen it, but I love that show because it's real space opera.
You know, it's it's ray guns and rockets and flying around and pirates and all that stuff. I really love that show.
You may have never heard of that show, but it's on, right? Well, there was a time that if you were a science fiction fan, you'd know exactly what show I was talking about.
But it's gotten so stratified that even people who love this content are able to gravitate to the exact kind of show that they love.
You know, so now there are shows that come out and I say, ah, it looks so much like a teen drama. I'm not going to watch that.
You know, whereas there was a time I would have watched anything because we were starving for it. You know, we're spoiling for choice.
Bing, ding, ding, you just said it. You just answered you.
You think it's because there's too much of a particular type of content.
No, but I think the reason why we have the situation we have now is because we were starving.
You just said it. We were starving. That's why we need all these channels. That's why we need the YouTube.
That's why we needed the Netflix because we weren't getting it. Well, maybe not the Netflix, but we weren't getting it from the old system.
That's why we had to break into into having cable, you know, because we were starving for it. It's a major point.
Where does the internet fit into this, right?
And I'm not talking about, you know, sending regular TV channels over, you know, the internet lines. I'm talking about, you know, particular websites or social media platforms, right?
There are people that spend all of their time on social media platforms. They don't even know.
The only exposure to like modern media and television shows and music is what, you know, if someone doesn't give them a link to the latest song on Facebook, they don't hear it.
Yeah.
And there are a lot of people that that is that, you know, we're in my opinion, we are getting stratified. We are getting to the point where we cannot have a common dialogue.
It's not just the Facebook, it's not just the Facebook, even the search engines now, because Google will base its future results on your past search results.
Exactly. Exactly. That information bubble as they call it.
Yeah.
Or that search bubble.
The search bubble and for the listeners that don't know what we're talking about, if I, when I was doing the newscast, searched for the Middle East, I would get a bunch of political pages.
So, and else might get tourists of the Middle East for the Holy Land, you know, depending on what they were.
And I went over to another search engine because of it. And the Facebook phenomenon getting getting, I am on Facebook.
I am on Facebook because I had a company I was working for for a couple of decades go out of business. And I wished I had the connections.
So now I'm working on having professional connections on Facebook. But I love it when people I know actually begin posting links to songs or talk about a TV show because I don't know how to find things anymore.
Well, you're not alone. You're not alone because, you know, when you, if you typed in top 10 songs, you have no idea if they're top 10 songs today or someone's opinion of top 10 songs.
Are they the billboard top 10 songs and does the billboard top 10 songs mean anything anymore?
Let me try to deepen this question for you, listen, Bronx, because before we had cable, I was a shortwave radio listener.
And the reason I was a shortwave radio listener was because what I could get on TV and radio, which was all we had, was not to my liking.
And so I listened to international radio on a funny radio.
So what I want to know is when you talk about top 10, I was building an app antenna to get Nordic countries because I want to hear their top 10.
Yeah, but that's, that's, that means that people who were dissatisfied with the old system like yourself, we were, we were doing what people have to do now back then.
You know, like, because I, I didn't know what I wanted back in my youth, but I had friends who were sort of who knew who were into different scenes, like the industrial scene or whatever.
And they could, they could turn me on to new stuff that I would have never found out otherwise.
So like I had curators, right? And so you were being a curator, you were letting your shortwave radio kind of be your curator and say, well, I don't like all the mainstream content.
So let me look around on what's on this sub list of shortwave radio stations that I can reach. And that's what's happening now.
I think I don't know if we have curators yet, but that's like the internet is there or whatever is there, we people knew to this sort of freedom.
Don't really know what to look to for satisfaction, but eventually people are going to figure out where they can go to find out what's cool in their, in their niche, in their bubble.
And they can kind of latch onto those. So yeah, I don't, I don't think there's going to be a top down.
This is what's cool now model anymore. I think it's, it's, it's segregated out and they're going to be curators of people who kind of know the cool stuff and kind of kind of can point you in the right direction.
And that's how you're going to find stuff.
Well, I think we will have here. We already have curators by proxy. I mean, that's what Google is.
That's what your Facebook contact contacts are. These are people that are delivering up content based on either their own opinions or the way they've gamified.
Their search results are just the way an algorithm has decided this, this is going to appear based on your.
Okay.
You said you were Google into this as a curator.
Do you believe that Google's algorithms are acting as an artificial intelligence to be a curator or do you believe that's part of the corporate model of the of the sphere of influence of of of the corporations owners being the curator.
Okay. Well, if we're talking Google, never forget that Google is not a search engine company.
Google is an advertising company.
They make money through advertising.
And it's the advertising that they serve up in conjunction with your search results.
And on other people, you know, through their ad words program on other people's websites and other, you know, other things are they're in the mobile.
You know, they're huge into the mobile scene as well.
So they are an advertising company and it is it is primarily their business to sell advertising.
You can make up your own minus to whether or not they are tailoring their search results to fit their business model or if their algorithms are are somehow.
I don't know.
I'm not sure to be honest.
I think I don't think it's see I don't actually assign a nefarious element to Google's the way Google does its business.
I mean, because they're pretty transparent about it when you stop and think about it.
I mean, I don't see any of their ads.
I have ad block on everything.
I never see their ads.
But in this day and age, astoundingly, most people still don't use ad block.
So, you know, most people are still seeing those ads.
So it's no surprise that when you click on Google and you search for something, you're going to get ads that, you know, you only have to use it once and you'll see that your ads are somehow connected to your search criteria.
So that's where I think it's important for them.
And they're going to maximize that any way they can are are they doing it in a way that is helping our culture or helping the individual anyway to find what it is they're looking for.
Are they being a responsible curator?
I don't know.
I guess it all depends on whether you find what you're looking for.
My search engine that I always use is duck duck go, but Google is number two.
And it's a hard number two because duck duck go, I use them because they don't track me and they don't do.
I don't have an information bubble a search bubble that is to say they don't base my next search on the previous ones, you know, and tailor that information toward me.
Their algorithm works differently and that's why I use duck duck go.
However, Google is often better at finding the thing I'm actually looking for, especially if I'm looking for something very specific like a search criteria for like a computer problem or something like that.
I almost always have to go to Google duck duck go gets my first shot, but I almost always have to still go to Google to get that sort of stuff.
And that's because it's a giant corporation and they put billions and billions of dollars into search engine results, you know, or get it tweaking the search and it's an ongoing technology that they continue to tailor and make better or worse or whatever.
But to get back to your point, they're always going to serve their bottom line.
That's what they do and their bottom line is advertising.
So I think that any argument or dialogue that people want to have concerning the relevance and the importance of the advertising in Google search results considering the incredible market share that they have in this field.
I think it's a very valid conversation to have. It's not what I'm especially interested in because I, you know, I never, as I say, I never see their ads. So it doesn't matter to me.
Are they are they shaping my results, right? The what I'm searching for. Are they being a bad curator?
That's a conversation that's worth having. You see, you see the thing is because because we, because we can talk about science fiction in the novel.
I do know by William Gibson, he very explicitly has the person has an AI that carrying with them that knows what music she likes.
So I was I'm looking at the word the topic of curation as as in that light to say, well, I mean, do we need people here is a question that I find to be pertinent.
Well, already Pandora does that. I mean, you tell the, you know, if you subscribe to the Pandora service, you know, music service, streaming service, you tell them what bands you like, what, what artists you like, and they don't necessarily serve up that artist.
They serve up artists that are like that in their opinion that their algorithm says is like this particular, you know, artists that you say like say, you know, we talked about sweet home Alabama.
I love that song. I want to hear more Southern rock, you know, or I want to hear that song. So you get a lot of Southern rock or music from that time period.
And Pandora is being a directorator, you know, right there. They're they're they're serving up music to you and a selection of music to you that you did not specifically choose.
You're letting them make that choice for you as a result, especially if you're initial certain, you know, you're, you know, the things you put in there initially is to say what your likes and dislikes were if they were obscure to begin with, you are probably going to be exposed to some stuff.
But you're not going to hear an awful lot of indie music out of there. Right. You're not going to hear an awful lot of garage band music out of there. You're not going to hear, you know, very, very specific stuff.
There are plenty of other places to go to for that stuff. And the internet has allowed people to mire them, not admire that's the wrong word to completely immerse themselves into a particular lifestyle that maybe in the past, they were like plateau brought up that the idea that his friends were into particular scenes and they acted as curators of music and cultural elements for him because they were kind of ambassadors from those scenes for him.
Well, in this day, like in that, say the punk scene in New York in the 70s, right. Well, if you weren't in New York in the 70s, you could love punk and you can be a punk and there are plenty of punks all over the world.
But if you weren't there at that time, you weren't part of that scene, you know, you were, you were definitely getting it second hand, third hand, you were hearing about this stuff long after it happened.
You were not helping to shape that culture, you were consuming that culture. In this day and age, you don't have to be in New York anymore, you know, to be part of the punk scene in St. Petersburg or, or, you know, hear the latest pop music from Japan or to, you know, I know people, the only, the only TV shows they ever watch are Korean television dramas.
That's all they ever see. They don't know anything else and they're Americans. They can't speak a word of Korean. That's just amazing.
You know, it's, we're in an era where you can get exactly precisely what you want. You don't necessarily have to participate in a larger dialogue that some other dominant force, either political one or cultural one, has decided is going to be what's popular.
You don't have to love Marilyn Monroe anymore when she pops up. You don't have to love, you know, the next Beatles when they pop up and, you know, lose your mind and have, you know, 50,000 fans screaming so loud. And this used to happen.
McCartney mentioned one time that during that very famous concert that the Beatles performed, I think it was at Chase Stadium and there were like 50,000 fans screaming so loud, they'd actually stop playing in the middle of it and no one noticed.
No one could tell because they couldn't hear the music. There was so much noise. I mean, you'll never see that again, but I don't think that's a bad thing.
I really don't. However, it will alter our culture fundamentally, you know, because we can no longer assume the other person has had the same experiences, even though supposedly we come from the same place already.
My brother-in-law, he waxes nostalgic about the rap scene from the early 80s, right? Well, you know, I was a white kid in the suburbs of Connecticut.
You better believe rap in the 80s did not exist where I lived, right? It was just not part of the dialogue. I have no idea what he's talking about from that time period to me. It's all historical, right?
So I have to research that to even understand what he's talking about. That was an early example of it, but it happens daily now. You know, major cultural influences. That may be the last major cultural, you know, influence that music has in our culture. That may be the last time it ever happens because nothing that came after that has stuck.
That's probably probably talked this one out. Or I should say there's so much more that can be said in this topic, but I, you know, I'm not actually looking for answers because I don't think there's an easy answer to be had, and I certainly don't have one.
I just wanted to bring up a question and maybe anybody listening, they might have an opinion. If so, it'd be great. They can, they can put them in the comments or better yet. Talk to somebody else. Talk to somebody or in, you know, do an HPR episode and answer to this one. That would be fantastic.
That would, but maybe maybe in part, and we should, we should, we should have two recent media, media things that each of us has found to be fantastic. Yeah, it's a great idea. What you got one, you got two.
Well, yeah, I got two. One, the more mainstream one is 13 reasons why Netflix a series about why a girl, a high school girl committed suicide and not just for the plot, not just because it shows the dark side of American high school, but for the soundtrack to and to be more obscure.
People could search YouTube. I know I've turned you, you onto this lesson Bronx is a guy called wise hop. He's a modern hobo who uses technology to hop on freight trains across Canada and America.
His videos are fantastic. He's, he, he is a hobo, but he's a hobo by choice. He's actually a trained cinematographer and gets work in in Canadian television and film. So his videos are amazing to look at. They're just gorgeous.
You'll never forget the one cut to you would like this. Yeah, on a freight car, a load freight car with no base, like just slates. He's making himself espresso while the train is moving. I thought you'd get a kick out of that.
That's, that's pretty brilliant. Yeah. And then to stand, he's, you know, he's on these things illegally. He, you know, he hops onto these things without anybody, you know, stopping him and he films the whole thing.
You guys got, let's see, I, keeping with the high school thing, I have become very enamored with the CW TV show Riverdale. That is based on Archie comics.
Okay. And I read an awful lot of Archie with growing up, but modern, the modern take on Archie is exceedingly different than anything that you might have grown up with or seen before.
Because it's very serious drama. It's actually very heavy drama. And in fact, the comics, most of them take place after high school or some of them do anyway, take place after high school.
And it occurred to me today, as I was reading through, I bought an archie comic digest when I was in, in the store, and I was reading through it. And those are the old, the old style Archie's and they still produce those, those are still being done.
But it occurred to me that the, the newer take on Archie Archie comics, it's filling a void in American comics that simply, again, scratching in it.
You know, we're, we were starving for this. It's, it's human, simple human drama in graphic novel or comic book format in American, you know, an American story.
Now the, throughout Asia and Europe, these story, you know, these kinds of comics are very, very easy to come by. But you have to go pretty deep to find indie comics of any, you know, that are easy to come, you know, you have to, you have to know where to look on the internet or you have to find them in a comic book specialty.
It's a comic book specialty shop to find comic books that are just dramas that are just human dramas, you know, and it's been that way for a while for a long time.
So that's what these are and they're probably the first popular, truly dramatic comics that are out there that aren't superheroes that aren't spandex or anything like that.
And the TV show is a different spin taken from that. They pulled some elements from the new Archie kept some from the old one and turned it into what I've heard it described as 90210 meets twin peaks.
Essentially, it is a story about a town called Riverdale where the Archie stories always take place. But it's a town that looks all sugary spice in 1950s sort of leave it to be around the surface, but hides a very dark and dismal sort of underbelly beneath it.
Where people, you know, families where everybody lies to each other and everyone has secrets and there's murder and there's rivalries and all this other stuff.
It's actually very well put together, very well done. So that's that's one second one.
As I say, I'm rewatching Stargate SG one and I'm going to go through all the Stargates that turned out to be a fairly large franchise and it's all gone now.
Now Stargate SG one has the distinction of being the longest running American television series, which is funny because it was made in Canada by a Canadian production company, but it's still considered an American show.
But that ran for 10 years on American television. Then there were two spin off series that followed it as well as a couple of TV movies.
I think they did a few novels and there might even have been some comics that came out. There were also some action figures and other merchandising that came out about it and all of it's gone.
Strangely, they let it drop and the entire franchise has vanished in the last couple of years. There's no there's nothing. There's no moving forward on it.
Now there is talk of a reboot. We'll see if it ever happened, but I'm going through the show one by one and I'm enjoying it because there are many of them I never got to see and didn't realize I'd never seen them.
So there you go. More tailoring specifically to me. Very good.
That Stargate is actually the, or at least it was for a long time, the grossing independent. It's technically an independent film because Dino DeLorrentis, who is a big time producer, created it just as an independent movie.
I mean, it turned into a huge franchise, which I'm sure he loves, but yeah, it's kind of interesting.
It's funny. It's, it's counted as an independent because I believe MGM had a piece of it, or at least the distribution.
Oh, I think that's what it is. It's, and Dino has been around for ages, so even calling him sort of an independent.
It's like technically, yes, he's independent because he's not employed by a studio, but I think guys no small, you know, he's not like some random guy who came up with an idea.
Well, he's dead now, of course, but his daughter has taken over. And of course, you know, you can say, well, Stargate was really huge.
Don't forget that, you know, the DeLorrentis, they put out the Bond films. You know, I mean, they're massive. They're almost a major studio on their own.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Okay, so my recommendations, I guess, will be Dynamite Comics, which isn't really recommending a comic, but it's it's this late.
It's a comic company, Dynamite. And what they apparently do is sort of they pick through all the sort of the intellectual property out there, artistic stuff that's like no one else is making comics up, and then they'll do comics.
So they've got like, you know, like evil dead comics, they've got Pathfinder comics from the RPG, they've got Red Sonia, Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, like just random stuff that you were you never really thought to look for as a comic book, but they'll come out with like a six series of books of these characters that you might might know from from old fiction or from some other property, and they'll do comics about it.
And so far, they've been quite good. I've been really pleased. So kind of, yeah, if you're if you're not into the superhero stuff, check out Dynamite Comics.
And then I guess I'll mention an artist named Seth frightening, who is I don't know even how I found this guy. I think it was just I think I saw a demo of his CD at a shop down in Omaru on the South Island of New Zealand, but I don't think he's from New Zealand.
He picked it up, and it's just really, really great music. It's really bizarre. And yeah, the band name and Seth frightening. It's on band camp. You can find it. It's pretty weird stuff, but but it's really good worth checking out.
Excellent. Well, on that note, I'd like to say goodbye and thanks for listening. And again, if you got, you know, any anyone listening, if you, you know, have any opinion about this or if especially if you really disagree with anything we're saying, please, please.
Make an HPR episode. Make one of your own. There's, you know, no barrier there. We're talking about media. There's a media outlet right there. Talk about tailored. You can do any subject you want. Anything that really matters that you think other people should hear about too. So thanks everybody.
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